You Will Soon Have To Pay A Monthly Fee To Play Madden And Other Video Games

Subscription Based Video Games Are Coming And You’re Going To Like It

Remember how much enjoyment you had as a kid, purchasing your favorite video game at the store? You couldn’t rush home fast enough to shred open the plastic and slam that disc (or cartridge) into your console of choice.

Those days are soon to be gone, because Electronic Arts Inc. Chief Executive Officer Andrew Wilson says subscription based video games are coming.

“There’s a world where it gets easier and easier to move that code around — where we may not have to do an annual release,” Wilson told Bloomberg TV host Emily Chang on her show “Studio 1.0.” “We can really think about those games as a 365-day, live service.”

Augmented reality could be one of the technologies that bridges the gap between the streaming world and the real one, Wilson said. One day players could earn rewards based on how many eggs they have in their refrigerator at home when they are playing The Sims or get online points for real life drills at soccer practice before playing FIFA. Geolocation tracking could make such events possible, according to Wilson.

“There’s a world not too far away from now where video games move from being a discrete, conscious experience to an indiscreet, subconscious experience,” he said.

“There’s a world where it gets easier and easier to move that code around — where we may not have to do an annual release,” Wilson told Bloomberg TV host Emily Chang on her show “Studio 1.0.” “We can really think about those games as a 365-day, live service.”

It’s a bit too early to figure out just how this model would work.

Would it be a monthly fee per game? Would it be a subscription service like GameFly? Would companies and publishers have their own services? Either way, physical/hard copies of games would soon become non-existent.

We’ve already seen the backlash with games like NBA 2K and the insane amounts of VC needed to make the game enjoyable, so it’s a bit alarming to see companies thinking subscription based games are the future.

I've written on a lot of your favorite websites while I live in my mother's basement. If you only knew what a hard time I'm having holding these alligators down. Woo. | Twitter: @GuyHut | FB: @GuyHutSports

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